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Sixty-six million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, paleontologist Steve Brusatte is piecing together the complete story of how they ruled the earth for 150 million years…

Sixty-six million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, Dr. Steve Brusatte, one of the leading scientists of a new generation of dinosaur hunters, armed with cutting edge technology, is piecing together the complete story of how the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a hugely ambitious and engrossing story of how dinosaurs rose to dominate the planet, written by one of the world’s leading palaeontologists.

Using fossil clues that have been with state-of-the-art technology, Brusatte traces these magnificent creatures from the Triassic period at the start of their evolution, through the Jurassic period, to their final catastrophic days in the Cretaceous and the legacy that they left behind. Along the way, Brusatte introduces a cast of new dinosaur hunters and gives an insight into what being a palaeontologist is really like. He offers thrilling accounts of some of the most remarkable discoveries he has made, including primitive, human-size tyrannosaurs, monstrous carnivores even larger than a T. rex and feathered raptor dinosaurs from China buried in volcanic ash.

At a time when Homo sapiens has existed for less than 200,000 years and we are already talking about planetary extinction, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a timely reminder of what humans can learn from the magnificent creatures who ruled the earth before us.

Dr Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist on the faculty of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He grew up in the Midwestern United States and has a BS in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago, MSc in Palaeobiology from the University of Bristol (UK), and PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in New York. At age thirty-one, Steve is widely recognized as one of the leading paleontologists of his generation. He has written over one hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers during his decade of research in the field, named and described over ten new species of dinosaurs, and led groundbreaking studies on how dinosaurs rose to dominance and went extinct. One of his particular research interests is the evolutionary transition between dinosaurs and birds and he is a noted specialist on the anatomy, genealogy, and evolution of the carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor.